July 2, 2025 • 53 mins
When AI makes creating content and code nearly free, how do you stand out? Differentiation now hinges on two things: unique taste and effective distribution.
This week, Bharat Vasan, founder & CEO at Intangible and a "recovering VC," explains why the AI landscape compelled him to return to founding. He sees AI sparking a new creative revolution, similar to the early internet, that makes it easier than ever to bring ideas to life. The conversation delivers essential advice for founders, revealing why relentless shipping is the ultimate clarifier for a business and why resilience, not just intelligence, is the key to survival.
Drawing from his experience on both sides of the venture table, Bharat breaks down the brutally competitive VC landscape and shares Intangible's mission: to simplify 3D creative tools with AI, finally bridging the gap between human vision and machine power. Listeners will gain insights on company building, brand strategy, and why customer obsession is the ultimate moat in the AI age.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:45 From Founder to VC and Back
03:17 Human Creativity in the Age of AI
07:50 The Role of Taste and Distribution
11:49 Building a Brand in the AI Era
16:17 The Venture Capital Landscape for AI Startups
20:11 Advice for Founders in the AI Boom
23:55 Incumbents vs. Startups
27:10 The New Generation of Innovators
29:19 Pirate Mentality in Startups
30:00 Building a Brand
36:28 Shipping and Resilience
41:49 Customer Obsession
46:58 The Vision for Intangible
51:52 Conclusion
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Learn more about Intangible at intangible.ai.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:06):
Welcome back to Chain of Thought, everyone.
I am your host, Connor Bronson, and today we are thrilled to
have Barat Vasan on the show. He is the founder and CEO at
Intangible. Barat, welcome to the show.
Thanks Connor, excited to be here.
Yeah, I am loving your background.
Anyone who's not watching on YouTube right now is missing
out. That's a sunny day there and
(00:26):
we've got a very fun background for you.
So definitely if you're listening on your podcasting app
of choice, that's great. But you know, you should really
check out the Galileo YouTube orevery episode of this comes out
and where you can explore so much more about Barat's journey
from founder to VC back to founder again with Intangible or
as he likes to refer to it, he is a recovering VC.
(00:47):
And to kick things off, I want to dive into what drove him back
into founder mode. What was that specific spark or
observation about the current AIlandscape that convinced you
that now was the time to build Intangible and dive back in?
Well, first, thank you. Excited to be here.
I've been listener of the pod for a long time, so this is
special for me. What brought me back to being a
(01:10):
founder here. I think the number one thing was
it's a very exciting time to be alive in technology.
And what I mean by that is, you know, we've lived through many
platform shifts when it was packaged good software.
And then, you know, the Internetcame along and then there was
SAS and there was containerization.
(01:30):
And AI is honestly changing hardware and software.
And so the kinds of things you can build if you're a builder
type are going to be pretty unique, pretty special.
And one of my beliefs is that the best way to do it is to
actually do it. And that's kind of how you learn
(01:52):
in these early, messy phases where, you know, it's not
exactly clear how it works. It's not really clear how it'll
get fleshed out. And in a few years, all that
will be, you know, clean and sanitize.
And, you know, it'll evolve on amore predictable path.
But right now, it feels like we're living through the very
early days of the Internet. And I was in college when, you
(02:13):
know, I came to this country from India and I'd only heard of
America. And I don't think my exposure
was mostly pop culture. So I was like a like a child in
India that was a, you know, a phenomenon of American pop
culture. And the first time I came here,
I remember just having access tothe Internet and telnet and FTP
and stuff that people don't use anymore.
(02:33):
And even though it was super niche, right?
Like you're like, you're hunger to be like, Oh my God, this
could be my conduit to the wholeworld was just so exciting.
And AIAI has that same vibe. You know, whether it's giving
billions of people access to collective knowledge throughout
the world or in my space, at least, you know, you're trying
(02:55):
to create films, movies, games, thing people just need to
entertain each other. It feels like another desktop
publishing revolution is what myCo founder would call it, where
it expands the human pool of creativity because now everyone
can unleash that and and that ispretty cool.
Yeah, I think we see a lot of skeptics push back and say, oh,
(03:16):
so much of what's being generated is slop.
And I think that ignores how much of any person's creative
process is fine tuning and figuring out what the right
things to build are. And we've made it so much easier
to just build a quick MVP and get it out there.
Now, does that mean we have a lot of things coming out that
aren't fully finished products? Sure.
(03:38):
But as we've seen in these last 20 years of the Internet era, we
have this idea of building in public and we are very much
enabling everyone in the world potentially to create AI
generated content and code and to bring their ideas into
reality, or at least into digital reality.
So far, what do you see as the evolving role of human
(04:01):
creativity and human generated content as this inference
revolution is occurring? I see it as making it more
accessible, right? I always think anytime.
So as far as creative tools go, as long as there have been tools
every time, you know, I think the benefit of technology is it
makes things easier and it makesit more accessible.
(04:23):
The Internet made knowledge moreaccessible.
Google made, you know, the Internet more searchable.
So every wave of technology thatcomes builds on top of something
that came before and expands everyone's access to that pool
of knowledge. And when I think about human
created content, you know, I think about the fact that human
beings fundamentally do it because it's fun, right?
(04:45):
And it's a play is a really important part of our species.
And so this notion that human beings are going to get
completely displaced because production of the content gets
easier, in my mind is it's misreading the situation.
And I think one reason people misread that is because it takes
so much effort to make a game ora movie at this point in time.
(05:06):
But, you know, it's hundreds of people, many years, sometimes
hundreds of millions of dollars.GTA might cost as much as a
billion dollars. You know, these are very, very
large numbers. And they just feel so
inaccessible, like you have to be a Christopher Nolan or David
Cameron or, sorry, a James Cameron or, you know, an EA to
make these big things. And every so many years that
(05:30):
clock gets reset in technology. And I think what's interesting
right now is the film and game spaces are a little bit beaten
down. You know, the agency space a
little bit as well. Only because production sucks up
so much of the time. There's very little time to do
the fun part. What's fun about this piece of
content, you know, it can be workshop, it can be build
(05:50):
different iteration. It's kind of like, no, we need
to green light an idea. It's rush, rush, rush
production, movie didn't work. Oh my God, panic, go back, fight
again with something else. And my hope, my hope with AI is
it rebalances that equation so you get more time to let the
idea bake because creativity is not this linear process.
It's a lot of exploration, just kind of like, you know, improv
(06:12):
comedy and AI allows people to explore those paths more
rapidly. And so hopefully what we get out
of this is better content. More ideation, more
experimentation. More ideation, more
experimentation, more talent being discovered.
Where's the next Spielberg goingto come from?
You know, because these are the tools that become accessible to
(06:32):
them. And I would say that's happened
throughout. You know, when the, you know,
the Handycam came out and you could have a camera in the palm
of your hand. That was a big deal when phones
had a camera come in, you know, going to smartphones had a
camera come in. That changed the game.
And I think we're just seeing that next wave, you know, that
next evolution of like, if you can, if you've got good taste
(06:53):
and you've got concepts and you're willing to work at your
crap, you can become a Mr. Beasttoo, right?
And many years ago, that would have been hard to do.
You have to have a network deal.You have to have producers,
you'd have an agency involved. You wouldn't be a guy in North
Carolina who just works at this crap so hard.
And then he has a distribution platform like YouTube that gets
so big that that becomes the thing that he broadcasts on.
(07:16):
And I think the this wave of AI is going to invent new things
like that, that change the spacethat you can't even anticipate
right now. So if the marginal cost of
digital creation, whether that'swriting code or creating
content, is trending towards 0 as I know you and others believe
it's going to in this new era, what will the 2nd order impacts
(07:38):
be for our audience and for everyone who's seeking to build
companies or create today? I think it's going to be about
taste and distribution. Why do you have the taste to
create content for a particular type of audience and can you
find distribution? So I do believe marginal cost of
writing code is going to go to 0and the marginal cost of
(07:59):
creating content is going to go to 0 as well.
So in a world where you can create as much content, you
know, as people can consume, thequestion becomes, how do people
even differentiate between that?How do they even discover your
content? And you know, what you've seen
with, you know, vibe coding to some degree on Twitter, some
other places, as, you know, people just putting their idea
(08:21):
out there on a distribution platform, right?
And telling their story, building in public.
And eventually it grows a user base that goes, oh, that's
really, really cool. I want to support this person.
Mr. BS is a great example of that phenomena.
And I think this AI revolution is going to bring other creators
to the fore. And whether it's YouTube or some
new, new distribution thing thatcomes in, you know, out there, I
(08:44):
think taste and distribution arereally going to drive adoption.
And I think one thing that that people building companies and,
you know, this is my advice to founders out there, take it for
what it's worth, is think carefully about what you want to
represent in a world that is flat, You know, where
distribution, you know, everyonehas it.
(09:04):
But your goal is to be crisp enough, compelling enough to
communicate to an audience that goes, oh, that's, you know,
that's my tribe. That's my that's my people.
Whether you're building a podcast or a company.
Yeah. You know, Salesforce is still
Salesforce. What do they do?
They're all about sales, right? And they'll include AI.
They'll include whatever the newflavor of technology is coming.
(09:26):
But what do you use Salesforce for?
It's sales. And surely there'll be better
tools that come out. But Salesforce brand is about
one thing. And Apple's brand used to be
about one thing. And I think as you think about
building these software companies, the brand is the
thing that that translates the most to people.
And figuring out how to make it relatable to people, find it
(09:46):
compelling to people is actuallyreally hard.
And it's a language problem. It's a zeitgeist problem.
It's a what's the product problem?
And every founder needs to be balancing those three things.
Whereas I think most, you know, founders feel like, you know, if
you just make a product and put it out there, it'll somehow
work. But what you actually see is
sometimes that works, but often startups are about bending the
(10:10):
world to this thing that you want to come alive, and the
world doesn't owe you followership.
And so you've got to generate that followership by talking
about it and talking about it crisply and white matters.
And that generates the energy that people go, you know what?
Sure, I'll give it a try. Oh, wow, this really is cool.
Oh, you know, I didn't like it last week, but they shipped this
(10:33):
and now it's really fun and I gave them some feedback.
They did something about it. All of those things play into
kind of how the company's perceived, and that's when you
go from building a product to building a company as a founder.
Yeah, I've thought about this idea for a long time as an
individual in my career of trying to treat my career and
(10:54):
how I approach it as if I were acompany of 1.
And OK, like who do I need to sell to?
How do I market? What kind of product am I
building with my own personal differentiation?
And I think dovetails nicely with this idea of, you know,
what's your personal brand, right?
That's something we've heard from every LinkedIn creator for
a long time. And you've suggested and I think
(11:15):
very accurately that software companies because of the reduced
cost of creation of software andcontent are essentially becoming
brands and tastemakers where we need to have great distribution,
we need to have great differentiation and you need to
have taste to it, establish thisand and strategy.
So what does it mean to be a brand, whether as an individual
(11:40):
content creator or as a company,in this new era?
Well, it depends on what part ofthe stack you're in.
You know, I think, you know, Nvidia's brand is about to be of
the best AI chips and our promises we'll have the most
innovative stuff, things that, you know, Intel has left by the
wayside and let them claim. But you have a few new chip
(12:00):
companies like Rock and others that are coming up in this new
AI era. I think about it as they're chip
makers, right? They're putting their, the
foundries, they're putting them,you know, they're making the
things that basically are the, the, the metal that power this
revolution. Then there are the
infrastructure providers, providers, right, the the AWSS,
the Google clouds of the world that are basically the layer on
(12:22):
top of that, on top of which youcan actually build.
Then there's model companies, right?
The open the eyes of the world. And then there are application
companies. I think the interesting thing if
you say like this is a, you know, if you're building an
application company, I think brands matter.
I think brand matters all the way up and down the stack.
But I think it especially matters at the application
layer. And I think the more you get to
(12:44):
building silicon, right? Like you've got foundries,
there's much more of a Moat, there's a lot more forgiveness.
I'm not saying you should take it lightly, but I'm saying
there's a little bit more of a Moat.
Whereas in the application space, there's no loyalty,
right? You're building in public your
products, no good people can just easily turn off a few
product. And so, you know, asking your
(13:05):
audience, cultivating your community to give you a little
bit of the benefit of the doubt as you continue to build this
very ambitious thing that servesthem.
And them believing that you willactually do that and you
actually showing that they're going to do that ends up
becoming the relationship between you and an audience.
And that compounds over time. And that's kind of how I think
(13:26):
about it from my company, right?We're not building this product
for ourselves. We love using the product, but
we're not the audience. If it doesn't work for users,
you've got to spend every week, every hour sitting and looking
at it and going, why don't they use it?
What makes sense? It's not their job to tell me
what's wrong with my positioningor why the product doesn't work
for them. I've got to go through and
(13:47):
figure out all of that stuff. I think one nice thing about
this new era of rebuilding and company is AI can help with all
that stuff internally, and then you can start to refine what you
want to mean within this space. I also think Fundamentally FAST
can build more ambitious companies in this day and age.
Definitely agreed. Coming out of VC and moving to
(14:08):
becoming a founder, like, you know, I think one thing becoming
a a venture capitalist gives youa lens for is how big a company
needs to be to generate returns for a fund.
And you know, man, you know, when my first start up, you
know, I had an exit, you know, it was life changing kind of
event for me. You know, 100 million was, I was
(14:30):
like, it was a lot. You know, it was a big exit.
It was a lot of money. And now most venture investors
are looking at it saying, hey, listen, valuations have gone up,
but we hope in the AI space there's, you know, a $10 billion
exit. And yes, maybe I'm paying a
little bit more. But every company that's taking
VC money, I think their VCs aren't hoping you're like a fund
(14:52):
returner, right, Which is, you know, your company sells
whatever percentage they own, 15%.
Yeah, it returns all the fund. They're hoping for something
that is going to do, you know, 5X10X the fund size that they
have. And I just felt like if you're
going to build a company and you're going to take venture
capital, let's focus on something that is that big.
(15:14):
And I can't think of a bigger opportunity than catering to
human creativity or building newproductivity just given the sort
of functionality that kind of, you know, productivity gain that
AI is going to unleash on all ofus.
I want to talk more about this idea of unleashing creativity
and kind of dive into the details of what does this mean
(15:37):
for incumbents who have established distribution versus
startups who have taste and vision.
But you've brought up a really good point that we should dig
into first, which is, you know, having been on both sides of the
table as a founder and AVC, what's your current assessment
of, of the venture capital landscape for AI startups?
It sounds like what you're hearing is VCs are seeking those
(15:59):
outsized returns and are willingto pay that premium because they
believe this idea of, hey, you can build a bigger company
faster and and maybe more broadly based off of the tooling
that's being established with AI.
Well, I think the VC business isreally interesting right now.
I think, you know, the Zerp era,the free capital spawned a lot
of allocation into the space. I think the lack of exits has
(16:24):
caused a lot of people who did pull money into the space to
pull back a little bit. I also think it's a craft
business. It doesn't scale as well as
people thought. And so if you're going to be in
the venture business, you're either going to be a really big
fund, right? And you're going to be able to
index many of the opportunities in the market.
(16:45):
So you know, you're going to seemost of the market, you're going
to place a lot of bets, some of them will work out and you you
accept slightly lower returns inexchange for not missing out on
the 5 or 10 companies that are market making in any given year.
On the other side of it, you've got the craft business, you know
the way venture capital used to be.
(17:06):
And that business is a sort of alone wolf business, you know,
where you have to be a really good picker, you have to have
some advantage networks, some advantage source of deal flow,
and you have some thesis, whether it's about the founding
team or the future. And you tend to be quite a lot,
(17:26):
right? And you can actually win those
deals. And that business has changed a
lot as well, just because the number of funds out there, it's
brutally competitive. It's still pretty hard, I would
say, to raise unless you're an AI.
And I think an AI, one reason every, you know, there's so much
interest is because people don'tfeel like this is a trend for a
few years. You know, it's not like the VR
(17:48):
space or anything where everyonepiles into you, but like, you
know, everyone's not going to walk around wearing VR devices.
But AI is one of those few technologies, but because it's
not just hard software, it's human eyed robots helping you at
home using some of the same algorithms that, you know, full
self driving and Tesla's was able to do.
And so the implications for thatkind of technology and what it
(18:10):
could do for everything from human longevity to chores to
population aging, like really big structural things that help
the economy grow are just truly profound.
And so if you're AVSC, you're thinking, listen, I'm going to
invest in a company. I really like the founding team.
I really like this idea. I think there's going to be a
great business over here. But then I'm just getting less
(18:31):
ownership or like, you know, I'mlike, I don't have as much of it
as I'd like. And you've got to weigh that
against just not having any of it, right?
Or missing out one of those deals and that's sort of that
tortured space that, you know, investors live in right now,
which is am I paying too much for this deal and owning too
little a bit versus am I missingout completely?
Am I investing in the wrong thing?
(18:52):
So I know a lot of people think VC is a cushy job and you know,
maybe it was when every company was going public and it was easy
to make money in SAS. But all of those safe harbours
within VC have really started todisappear over the last three
years. And with the end of free money,
you know, from the Fed, I think it's really really, you know,
(19:14):
return that business to what it should have been, which is, you
know, very specific focus on a very specific strategy that that
investor is executing in the market.
It's still easier than being an,you know, an actual operator, I
will say as founder, but it's not an easy business.
It just takes a really long timeto find out if you're wrong.
That's the one thing about the VC business that it's just
different from founders. You know, it's very hard to to
(19:37):
hide the fact, but you haven't built a great product and you
know, your users are turning offor whatever it is.
And I think investing is different because you do get
these 10 year funds and you're investing them over three years
and it takes anywhere between 7 and 15 years to see any returns.
So imagine you and I have jobs where it's like, you know, it's
(19:57):
seven years before anyone figures out for any good.
And we're farther in the bare metal, so we're not getting
much. More.
Feedback. Exactly.
What about on the founder side? What actionable advice would you
give to other founders who are also navigating the fundraising
process with this new environment that's been
established over the last coupleyears, and specifically the AI
(20:20):
boom environment? Depends on what your business is
and why you got into it in the first place.
I would first and foremost say this is my third venture back
start up. You know, my first two were
acquired. So you know, I started this
company because I had a space I really liked, right, which is
the media and entertainment space.
(20:41):
I have a Co founder that I deeply respect and really like
being in business with going to work everyday.
We have a team that's really, really great.
Then I have investors in my cap table were great and are not
drama, right? And so for me, a lot of those
pieces came to fit and everything else about it.
You still got to do the work, you know, as, as YC says, like
you've got to make, you know, something that people love.
(21:04):
And that is all about digging trenches.
And if you don't like digging trenches, then I suggest you
don't become a founder in this market or any other market
because it's not this high concept that gives it to you.
I think some, some founders certainly end up becoming better
storytellers than other founders.
But it doesn't take away the pain of like, OK, you know,
(21:25):
we're trying this out. Nobody responded to my product.
What part of it doesn't work? It's a very, very creative
enterprise. Like what should be quite
differently and the speed at which you uncover and turn over
those cards is really, really important.
So I don't know that my advice to founders in the AI space,
it's certainly easier if you have an AI startup, by the way,
I will say that. But you know you, even if you
(21:48):
didn't, I would say the speed atwhich you can ship clarifies for
you whether you have a business or not.
And it clarifies for the world and other investors whether you
have a business or not. And so my religion at every
startup has always been shipped as quickly as you can.
It's OK if it doesn't work because if it doesn't work,
you'll learn something. And if it does work, you learn
(22:08):
something. But not shipping, you get to
live in your little bubble and vision of what it's going to be
5 years from now, 10 years from now.
And it's really easy as a founder to fool yourself because
your team doesn't want to hear the bad news.
You don't want to hear the bad news.
You have this huge bias around. It's going to work, right?
And I think that, you know, as Andy Groves said, like only the
(22:31):
paranoid survive. So maybe that's not the right
philosophy for every founder, but it's it's been helpful to
me. Like, you know, the moment
you're like, oh, that's it. It's really exciting.
Oh, that's it. That's who we need.
These people love our product. We found our little tribe.
How do I find more people in that community?
How do I build more stuff for them is just such an exciting
(22:51):
moment. And that clarifies, by the way,
everything about your culture, who you hire, how you go to
market, what features you build.You know, everything becomes so
much easier when you get that moment.
But most founders gets between, you know, the idea and that
product market fit phase. I think I read a stat something
like only 15% of companies are getting to Series A.
(23:13):
Maybe it's 30%, but it's pretty,it's a pretty low number.
There are lots of seed stage startups getting funded, but
fewer of them are making it to the Series A.
And I think that's reflection of, you know, the AI boom.
People are willing to write small checks into a large number
of companies, but then it's not really clear.
So I always think one round ahead to where does my company
(23:38):
need to be in order to receive that funding or be profitable.
Basically I got to be default alive.
Yeah, I, I think I've definitelyheard that phrase default alive
from, from other great founders.And I think it's also
interesting to look at the impacts that AI is having on the
relationship between incumbents and startups where it's so much
(23:58):
easier to get started with a startup now where it's like,
yeah, I can vibe code an app in an afternoon, have a demo and I
can maybe go out and start pitching.
But this also means that major incumbents who have established
distribution, who have established communities can much
more rapidly adapt in certain areas.
How do you see the current move of hey, it's easier to code,
(24:23):
it's easier to write, it's easier to create, or at least of
the basic levels, even if getting from, you know, 80% to
100% may still be very hard, impacting both the incumbents
who threatened startups and the startups who are attempting to
carve out new niches? That's a great question.
I I, it's probably easier than ever before to start a company
(24:44):
and any good idea is going to get copied.
And I think the difference between the companies that sort
of get through this uncanny valley of like, you know, we
have a good idea to, we have a company with customers that's a
real business that's, you know, generating profit, or at least
it's fundable by the world. I think the big difference is
(25:06):
they discover something that is uniquely bears like Mr. BS
discovered. Like, you know, there was this
whole other way to produce content, relate to an audience
and build it out. It's not like there weren't
Youtubers before that. But he had a vision that was
just bigger than everybody else.And he had the ability and the
skills and he put in the time and the effort to build it.
(25:28):
And so I do think AI is a vertical technology.
It's just like the Internet being, you know, incorporated
into all software. That's going to happen with all
of the incumbents and they will have distribution, but
incumbents are have a bunch of disadvantages.
And again, I worked at a big company, then went to start my
own company. So I have some lens of this one.
(25:49):
They're slow. Speed is the advantage of every
startup. You have nothing that you're so
attached to in the world. Whereas if you ever worked at a
big company, you know the product that you have the PNL,
you have the public reporting, the review cycles, you know, the
HR cycles you've got to go to, to replays talent OR recruit any
(26:09):
town. Like everything about a big
company is slow. So in other words, it's it's
very big and it can crush you, but it's a very, very slow
moving. So one advantage of startup has
is speed. I think the second advantage of
startup had is just creativity, right?
There are things that you can capture for a new generation of
users that the last generation of companies wasn't really
(26:30):
focused on, but for example, andcan be in super boring spaces
too, or spaces that, you know, because those users really care
about it. You know, as an example, there's
a tool many of us use in startupland for our bug tracking
feature request, like just how development work gets done.
It's called linear, right? And linear does pretty much the
(26:51):
same thing that, you know, Jira did.
And before Jira there were othertools that did it, shortcuts,
but it's a. Now, yeah.
Yeah. And so you get fresher takes in
the world, and they build something that's so insanely
great. You're just like, you know, if
I'm going to start something today, that's what I'm going to
be on. But I'm not going back to the
old way. So there's always a new
(27:11):
generation of people. You know, Canva and Figma were
the same way, right? Like Illustrator existed before,
Photoshop existed before. But when Melanie Perkins, you
know, the founder of Canva, cameto the Valley, she met with
every VC and they told her, like, this is probably not a big
market. You know, Canvas orders a
bigger, a magnitude bigger than Sigma, which is based right here
(27:33):
in San Cisco. And it's really because she had
an insight that the rest of the market simply overlooked.
And you would be surprised at the number of times that happens
both in startup land and with big company.
So the second advantage of some key insight you have that the
world for whatever reason is like, yeah, that's really not a
thing. Like Airbnb, Yeah, sleeping in
(27:55):
strangers beds at home, not a thing.
Getting into strangers cars, like, you know, that's not
really a thing. And so the market systematically
underestimates these things until it works and then everyone
piles into it, but it's a littletoo late.
So the second thing is I would say inside.
And the third thing I would say with really big companies is I
(28:15):
don't know the best way to say it is sometimes, you know, it's
like it's you. You've been a Lannister for so
long, you forget how to fight orsomething.
Yeah, right. The walls are really high.
Everyone's really rich. Like, you know, life is really
comfortable. You got people waiting on you.
You're not manning a post on thewall.
Yeah. You're not talking about the
White Walkers in the Wall. And it's really, really cold,
(28:35):
and you're trying to find food. And that's kind of what founders
have. They have that, you know, that
that hunger that, you know, thatlittle dog in them are just like
I got to figure out how to make this thing work every single
day. You know, as a founder, if me
and Charles don't get out of bedand we're moving things forward.
I'm not saying our team doesn't do that.
Our whole team is like that. We're, you know, like an
(28:57):
entirely, but the culture is very different from, you know,
when I worked at a big company, if I got up and I didn't do
anything, I took a week off, 2 weeks off, a month off.
It wouldn't be out of because you know, the business has
revenue. It's profitable.
Like, you're not, you as a person are not going to break a
business, right? And I think startups are like a
little bit like pirates. They're like they got into this
(29:18):
leaky boat with a bunch of firesburning on board and like,
you're off looking for treasure And like, you know, most likely
you won't find it. But eventually you hope to
upgrade to something a little bit bigger and then bigger and
then hope someday you end up like the US Navy, right, with
the sailor standing on the deck.And it's an aircraft carrier.
But in the beginning, it's just a boat with usually, like, you
(29:38):
know, one to three people as founders just rowing away and
then be like, well, you know, there's going to be treasure
over there. Let's go check it out.
Or we have this vision and literally nobody should follow a
bunch of pirates. But it's also where all the good
stuff comes from. Something new comes into the
world. Yeah.
And I think another aspect of this idea around insights too is
(30:00):
that even if you have the insight, if you don't execute on
it, if you don't create a differentiation, if you don't
establish taste around it, as you brought up earlier and you
aren't relentless about it, it'sso easy to fail.
As you mentioned, there are so many competitors that will clone
you today. And if you rest on your laurels,
(30:22):
it's very easy to fall back there.
So while it's both easier to start a startup, I also think
it's becoming hyper competitive as every startup has that hits
any sort of success, has multiple clones.
And so any, you know, taking your foot off the gas too much
as as some folks may have learned to do at larger
companies, will, you know, leaveyou open to these pirates to
(30:44):
come rate you. And you've been talking, I think
throughout this interview so fararound this idea of approaching
the new paradigm of AI building and building for this new AI
era. And I know that you've set some
rules as well for brand marketing and how to approach
it, particularly for software companies in this new area era,
(31:08):
when a startup trying to cut through the noise may
theoretically have someone copycatting its features very
next week at unprecedented speed.
How do you act differently in this extremely agile,
fast-paced, AI enabled era? Gosh, that's a good question,
man. I think the first thing is
(31:30):
there's multiple paths to victory, right?
Like the people who are the loudest on Twitter aren't the
ones crushing it. There's somewhere, you know, for
every one of those, there's probably 20 founders who found
some niche that they can tackle.They're building a large
business. You'll hear about them like many
years down the line because right now, like, they're not the
(31:52):
noisy ones on Twitter. So I think the first thing is
just doing the work, but at the brand level, at the relating to
your user level, figuring out ifit's actually working and just
really being customer obsessed. It's really, actually really
hard because as a founder, you have VCs, you have conferences,
(32:12):
you have all the stuff that sortof distracts you.
It's designed to distract you. And one big piece of advice I
have it's, you know, it's it's not brand.
Your brand is going to be built if your startup is successful.
And I think too many people get into it because they can get to
the NFL and they don't realize getting to the NFL is different
level of competition. Every round you raise isn't more
(32:33):
glory, it's more pressure to perform at an even higher level.
And and investor dollars are notsome sanguine type of thing.
They're expecting a return out of them.
And so this is a long winded answer, right?
But your question was how do people go by building a brand?
My advice to counters would be one do the work and be
(32:57):
relentless about it. Just customer obsessed.
Be creative about it. It's not just about the grind.
It's like, you know, how do I communicate differently even
it's the same customer? How do I do this differently?
What makes it relatable? But nothing solves for hours
spent with customers as opposed to conferences, BC parties,
whatever. I think the second thing is if
(33:17):
you can get good at language andAI is leveling that a little
bit, figure out what's the best way in which you can communicate
your vision. It is very, very hard for
startups to cut through the noise when the founder has a
great idea but they don't have aCo founder.
He, you know, has that gift of language to translate that for
the world. And you know, This is why I like
(33:38):
2 founder systems, you know, because there's at least 2, a
few and you have a way to bounceideas off of you.
So I think language, figuring out what format you communicate
the best, how do you best put the message out there?
Because the thing you can changeabout it is yourself.
Like you're the limiting factor.You are who you are, you do the
things you do well. And so figuring out how, what
(34:00):
modes you communicate well, I think is the second piece of
advice. And the third thing, as I would
say, take some risks. I think, you know, people, it's
like a frog boiling type of thing.
You come out of a big company oryou know, I believe had a failed
startup. Like you don't know what that
page is like where you like never again.
And so you just start taking risks that don't feel, you know,
(34:21):
like, oh, what's going to happento my brand?
Like nothing's going to happen to your brand.
Nobody like nobody knows you exist.
Like nobody knows that my company exists.
It's a really big world. And so take the advantage of
this time to take some creative risks and see if that cuts
through the noise. Those are probably the three
things. And I think founders tend to be
very conservative about those. They either don't put in the
word or they end up being too conservative on the message.
(34:44):
And then it doesn't cut through a noise where it's a pretty
noisy world. And this isn't new, by the way.
You know, Jobs said this at Apple.
It's a noisy world. And actually, the hardest thing
to do is simplify and make your company about one thing.
Focus, clarity, focus, clarity. And it takes a lot of effort to
Polish a company down to like one thing because when you
(35:06):
start, you have like a million ideas and then you see your
competitors and you're like, oh,maybe you should be doing that.
Oh, the VCs want this and I needto raise my next round.
Maybe our story should have someof this.
And what that does is it confuses the brand around, you
know, are you base or are you bad?
And there's not enough fidelity around it.
So that's probably my number onething.
Believe in what you're trying todo over the long run and focus
(35:28):
on that one thing and have the data from users kind of be your
North Star as opposed to all of the noise and start up land.
Always make your customers beer taste better.
And I know that this, you know, layers of distractions that can
occur. These can really take builders
(35:52):
off track. Whether that's, you know, as you
pointed out the narrative that'sbeing pushed to raise that next
round or conferences, something else, it can leave start-ups in
a position where maybe they get commoditized, where they're not
actually out innovating their competitors.
And everyone seems to be building similar wrappers,
(36:13):
similar agents in some of these areas.
How do you think founders today should be avoiding this trap and
building something that's truly defensible, as you put it
earlier? I think shipping clarifies.
The number one thing I've found helpful to me is if you have a
thesis, you ship it and then youget to see if it works, or I
(36:33):
should say differently, you can see what parts of it worked,
what parts of it didn't work right.
And I think people imagine this is 1 big event.
You do your open beta or you close beta and then this huge
thing happens. I think with start-ups, it's
more like you have hundreds of these things that you know
happen every, you know, over time.
And then you get very, very goodin your judgement about, oh,
(36:55):
this is the thing, you build a lot of conviction when the gap
between those ship periods is pretty long.
You just have two little data. You live in your own head.
You know, everyone's got a road map, Everyone's got this future
they want to build. But I think, you know, shipping,
I would say clarifies because ittells you exactly where you
stand. And then you're, and if you know
(37:17):
where you stand, you can do something about it.
I've always said startups are not a test of intelligence, by
the way, it starts where a test of intelligence.
This all the smartest people would be doing startups, right?
Like no startups would ever be founded by anyone except the
smartest people. But what you find to start a
business, to have it be successful, it's a test of
(37:38):
resilience and creativity and persistence and all of the stuff
that you know, and it turns out like 90% of people, whether you
play a sport or you do startup, they just don't have what it
takes to get up every single dayand you know, and grind away,
right, with no reward. You're working on your craft and
the work itself has to be rewardenough.
(38:00):
And I just don't think this isn't like a criticism of that
or it's just like like most human beings don't have that.
What person would want to, if you could have a great job that
pays you really well at a tech company or any other company and
you could have vacations, you get a family and kids, you know,
why would you want to work Memorial Day and like Sunday and
Saturday and schedule meetings and have this just be normal and
(38:21):
everyone's looking at you like, why are you guys doing this?
You don't get paid that much. Like you don't even know if it's
going to work. And so it's really not a test of
intelligence. If we were smart, we would just
not do it. But you've got to want something
so badly that like, you know, the best people to build it is
you and you want to, you know, recruit other people to your
(38:42):
cause. So I always think about it as
like it's a little bit of a cult, like a little bit of a a
mission, little bit of religion you're creating.
We're like, this is the thing we're going to do, guys, And
when we do, it's going to be awesome.
And by by the way, that pirate analogy is still holds, right,
because always like, you know, there's always some Jack
Sparrow. He's like God, It's going to be
amazing. We're going to get there.
(39:03):
It's going to be treasure, right?
And just imagine how awesome it's going to be.
But that works, you know, with getting people to, you know,
they're, I think Steve Jobs saidwhen you ask for help around
something compelling in the world, you will find the help.
People will come out of the woodwork to support your
particular thing. You just don't know where it is.
(39:24):
But you've got to keep at it every single day until that
message gets through. And so, you know, that's my
whole thing. I don't think there's like 1
answer for how a startup becomessuccessful or one type of
founder. I don't think there's any point
worrying about competition. I heard Paul Graham say, like,
you know, the thing that startups enjoy is the same thing
(39:44):
airplanes in the sky enjoy, which is, it turns out there's a
lot of air separating all these airplanes.
There's plenty of room to support many different types of
companies. And sitting in your Twitter feed
or your LinkedIn feed and be like, Oh my God, this thing
shipped yesterday. It's going to destroy us.
It's a moment of panic, but it means it's a blip in the grand
scheme of things. You don't know how they're
really doing. You don't know how hard they're
(40:07):
working, you know, know what's wrong with their company.
So. I think shipping always
clarifies because users tell you, yeah, I like it, but I
don't love it. And you're like, cool, what can
I do to fix that? How do I get people to love my
product? And, you know, there's that
moment where, like, you get those little bits of
encouragement, long plateaus if nothing happens.
And then one day you're like, oh, my God, this really worked.
(40:28):
That's crazy. And then sports is like that.
If you've ever played sports like you know, you know, I was a
tennis player, it's like it takes hitting a lot of hitting
against the ball to get your forehand and you work in your
backhand, you work on your smash, your volleys.
But if you like it and you really want to learn, you know,
your sport and it's a true for any other sport or music or
anything else. It just takes a while to to
(40:51):
master it. So you know, for folks that want
to master this and want to be inthe grind, it, it actually is
kind of fun. And when you're doing something
AI, you have the knowledge of knowing.
Look, it's all new. Yeah.
Like I have the same advantage some, you know, 20 year old kid,
15 year old, you know, kid does there's someone who's 50 years
old and has education. But it's just a matter of we're
(41:13):
all navigating the same market. It's all new.
And we're all being enabled to ship faster, whether that's, you
know, writing an extra LinkedIn post, building your next
feature, whatever else it might be.
There is an opportunity to leverage AI to help us ship
faster. Seems to clarify for me that OK,
great. We have to constantly be
shipping. You have to constantly trying
(41:35):
things. You have to be taking that data
back in, iterating, experimenting, as we've talked
about throughout the episode. But how do I build that
resiliency of taking on that grind?
And how do I build that, I guesscultural optimism into the DNA
of my AI company As I as I buildit, what do I need to do to
(41:55):
ensure that not only am I obsessed over it as a founder,
but also everyone I'm bringing on board is joining me in that
obsession and wants to solve customer problems and is excited
and fired up to do that. How do I get them to work on
that forehand? I think it's really hard.
I think the first thing is, you know, you lead by example.
So you you've got to be willing to do it.
And so first of all, I would saybeing a founder is not the right
(42:18):
answer for everyone. In fact, I would say it's not
the right answer for most people, just like being a pro
basketball player is not the right answer, you know, for me
and for most people. And so I don't mean to suggest
founders are in different category.
It's just that they're optimizedfor a different thing they're
optimized for like, you know, we're just in the grass while
the elephants are fighting and some people are better for
(42:39):
running things at Google scale, right?
Then a founder might be at that that stage.
I think one, you've got to be interested in the problem long
run. I think 2 you've got to be
wanting to be in business and I would say not just like, you
know, you can work with someone,but it helps if you admire
someone. Like I really admire my Co
founder and that keeps me wanting to do better, right?
(43:03):
And he has the same level of things as those mutual
admiration Society of like, Oh my God, it's so cool because
that's all you have this little 1 you started.
It's just like 2 of you. It's so cool that I get to work
with this person. Maybe you can build something
great. It's like you're starting a
little pride, right? So you got to be excited about
the little things and you're not.
Then it just becomes, oh, we're just going to add more
engineers, we're going to add more people.
(43:23):
That will all come. But you've got to want to work
with people around you. Same thing with investors.
I think third is you got to want, you've got to like your
customers. I think one thing I learned
across companies as an investor and even my first couple of
things is I think my second start up, which was like in the
smart home business, it's like it was a we're building smart
(43:47):
locks, right? And it's a company called
August. Super cool.
Loved it as a customer. I don't know if I ever woke up a
day as a kid and went like, you know, I love gadgets, which is
why I got into it. But I don't know that, as you
know, like 12 year old, 15 year old broth would go, oh man, I
want to be in the lock business someday Was just never like a
thought. Yeah, like, oh man, I'm going to
be the video game business, you know, someday.
(44:08):
And that that came through for me.
I worked at EA many years. And so you've really got to like
your customers. That's that's who you should be
spending the most time with. And I think when you don't have
that affinity, right? If you love payroll, it's fine.
You just got to love working on payroll for the, you know, for
your customers, not everyone. But when you don't, it sort of
becomes like an intellectual problem, right?
(44:29):
Like, oh, the product manager will work on it, the engineer
works on it, but you're not setting that tone.
Everyone ought to care about this.
Like Parker Conrad or Brooklyn is great at this, but that guy
cares about benefits and like payroll and all of these little
details so much that everyone that works for the company just
knows they have to care about itat least somewhere close to the
(44:50):
ballpark because the CEO is reading customer support ticket.
Jamie at Ring, you know, the doorbell company, you know the
camera company. Jamie had like his e-mail on all
of the Ring boxes for a very long time.
So, you know, when your CEO takes customer support seriously
at that level, it leaves no excuse for the rest of the
(45:10):
organization because they're notfocused on some project meeting
they went to. They're they're getting emailed
every single day about. And Bezos said the same thing on
Amazon. So, you know, I think that does
set the tone. And I think the last thing I
would say, decide what kind of business you want to be in.
There are plenty of businesses that don't require taking
venture capital. And, you know, venture capital
(45:30):
is really rocket fuel, right? It is meant for rockets.
It meant like if you take it, the assumption is you're a
rocket, you're going to go to space, like you're going to fly
high up in the air. But most businesses are not
venture capital businesses. So it's just helpful to figure
out, you know, this is a lifestyle business, which in the
AI age, you might actually be able to create entire lifestyle
(45:51):
businesses, you know, that pay your bill for the rest of life.
You can have a very good life managing a ton of people and you
can learn a few skills and keep evolving it.
You saw some of that in the SAS days, but I think you're going
to see a lot more of it in this AIH.
You're going to see it from all parts of the world with venture
capital is this pressure taker of like we're trying to build a
(46:12):
5 billion, $10 billion business.So if you're that type of
founder and that's your capital base, you've got to realize that
that's the game you've gotten yourself into and you've got to
figure out how to build that type of company, attract those
types of people and generate that type of outcome.
So I do think capital puts that pressure on you.
So be careful as you go through these rounds of what you're
(46:35):
seeing in your data. And also just be honest about do
I really want to build that scale of company or am I happy
with something much, much smaller?
And it sounds like a 16 year oldBarat may have been really
excited about the idea of you building a company that is
enabling creativity in 3D and art.
(46:58):
And as we talked about earlier, with this idea of, you know,
inference and coding and writingall becoming so much easier to
access for everyone in the worldand easier to get started with.
I can tell you're fired up aboutthis idea of, hey, let's help.
Collaboration for film, for games, whatever else we're
building becomes so much easier with Intangible and I I very
(47:22):
much see you taking those lessons too from Canva and
Figma, which they clearly did around this huge creative market
as well. I'm, I'm excited about
technology expanding that creative envelope for people.
And, and I think the one of the reasons I resonate so strongly
with it is, you know, I grew up in India, there wasn't a lot of
(47:44):
import export type of stuff. So, but I had two sets of Legos.
1 was like a space Lego and thenI think 1 was like a
construction Lego. And as a kid, that's, that's all
we could afford. And I forget who'd given it to
us. I would create all of these
things with the Legos, right? And as an introvert, like you
spend a lot of time like building things and constructing
things about how the future is going to be.
(48:04):
You see, the technology has donethat for successive generations
of kids and builders, right? Like kids are building on
roadblocks right now. And those kids are going to grow
up and become engineers or buildsomething cool and interesting
and different. And I do think these cultural
influences have a huge impact onthe future.
And I'm very excited about AI being able to orchestrate things
(48:29):
that were previously very complex, like those Lego blocks,
right? The fact that they fit exactly
right. And it was that easy.
And then you've had time and youfigured out how to create a
building. And you're like, well, I'm going
to create a tree or a space station.
But you were just figuring things out, and it was just fun.
And so my hope is, you know, someday you're sitting in, you
have the same resources that a James Cameron or Christopher
(48:49):
Nolan are the world's best game makers do.
And, you know, there's expert and you're sitting in a room,
you're like, you know, should bedoing the cinematography this
way. You know, what about a drone
shot over here? Wouldn't it be cool if the car
jumped over this bridge and you're just telling stories,
right? And you're able to create
something and you're able to putit out in the world and people
go, oh, that's really, really cool.
And even if it's not, you know, it's not for like commercial
(49:11):
appeal, it's just fun, even if it's just for your group of
friends, even if it's, you know,something fun for your parents
or your family you did or something you showed off at, you
know, Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas.
Those are like the little moments where I'm like, you
know, it's not about some big corporate thing where you're
producing big commercials and stuff.
It might actually bring the fun back to those micro moments.
(49:33):
And so I'm very excited about the fact that there are all of
these models out there right now, right at least in Myspace.
So what intangible does is we'rebuilding the world's simplest 3D
creative tool to communicate better with all of these AI
models that have incredible power that you've got to
communicate with them through typing.
So imagine you had like the world's most, you know, gifted
(49:55):
cinematographers, production crew, lighting people, whatever
it is. And you have Christopher Nolan,
like famous director on the other side.
And the only way he can communicate with them is by
text. He's got to do an entire movie
by text, move the camera to the left.
I want this. And then they, you know, it
takes a few minutes and then you, you know, it shows up and
(50:16):
he's like, no, no, no, that's not quite right.
And that's kind of the state of art right now, you know, with,
with ChatGPT and tools like that, at least in the media
space, right. If it's just text based
reasoning, research totally makes sense that text is the
right interface. And, you know, prompting is the
best thing. You want the thing that's in
your head as a human being to bethe thing that you see on the
(50:37):
screen. And text is just not the right
way of doing that. So the promise for intangible at
least is can we build something that allows human beings to get
the vision that's in their head to a machine, which, you know,
is orders of magnitude more powerful and can give it to you.
But it can't translate that if all you're doing is texting it
(50:58):
little bits of context. And if you can simply show it,
you know, in 3D in this interactive world, this is what
I need. And even if you do a rough
sketch of it, it take it and runand create a whole production
great environment, right? And that's that speed and
control that you want in these early stages.
And I think of Legos like that. It's speed and control.
I can control every little pieceof it, but it's also really,
(51:20):
really fast to put things together.
And the more you do it, the moreit builds your confidence.
And I feel like that's what Canva did.
That's what Figma did. So in this world of, you know,
models that are starting to do film and games and, you know,
campaign commercials and all thestuff is some way to create
virtual cinematographers and other people that you can have
(51:40):
conversations with and you can get good at this crap if that's
something you're excited about. I'm, I love it.
I'm super excited to see what you build with Intangible and
everyone can check it out at intangible dot AI and request
early access. Plus make sure you follow Barat
on LinkedIn where he shares a ton of incredible insights.
Bro, is there anywhere else thatour audience should be going to
(52:02):
check you out and follow the work that's being done at
Intangible? Twitter as well, and yeah,
people are curious about it, curious about the space.
Happy to tell you more, at leastmy point of view.
And thank you for having me on. Yeah.
Thanks for coming to share your point of view with our
listeners. It's been a fantastic
conversation. And everyone who is listening,
make sure you keep up with the latest AI news and expertise
(52:24):
from folks like Barat here on the podcast by subscribing in
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(52:46):
Thank you all for tuning in and we'll see you next week, Brat.
Thanks again for coming the show.
It's been fantastic having you.
Welcome back to Chain of Thought, everyone.
I am your host, Connor Bronson, and today we are thrilled to
have Barat Vasan on the show. He is the founder and CEO at
Intangible. Barat, welcome to the show.
Thanks Connor, excited to be here.
Yeah, I am loving your background.
Anyone who's not watching on YouTube right now is missing
out. That's a sunny day there and
(00:26):
we've got a very fun background for you.
So definitely if you're listening on your podcasting app
of choice, that's great. But you know, you should really
check out the Galileo YouTube orevery episode of this comes out
and where you can explore so much more about Barat's journey
from founder to VC back to founder again with Intangible or
as he likes to refer to it, he is a recovering VC.
(00:47):
And to kick things off, I want to dive into what drove him back
into founder mode. What was that specific spark or
observation about the current AIlandscape that convinced you
that now was the time to build Intangible and dive back in?
Well, first, thank you. Excited to be here.
I've been listener of the pod for a long time, so this is
special for me. What brought me back to being a
(01:10):
founder here. I think the number one thing was
it's a very exciting time to be alive in technology.
And what I mean by that is, you know, we've lived through many
platform shifts when it was packaged good software.
And then, you know, the Internetcame along and then there was
SAS and there was containerization.
(01:30):
And AI is honestly changing hardware and software.
And so the kinds of things you can build if you're a builder
type are going to be pretty unique, pretty special.
And one of my beliefs is that the best way to do it is to
actually do it. And that's kind of how you learn
(01:52):
in these early, messy phases where, you know, it's not
exactly clear how it works. It's not really clear how it'll
get fleshed out. And in a few years, all that
will be, you know, clean and sanitize.
And, you know, it'll evolve on amore predictable path.
But right now, it feels like we're living through the very
early days of the Internet. And I was in college when, you
(02:13):
know, I came to this country from India and I'd only heard of
America. And I don't think my exposure
was mostly pop culture. So I was like a like a child in
India that was a, you know, a phenomenon of American pop
culture. And the first time I came here,
I remember just having access tothe Internet and telnet and FTP
and stuff that people don't use anymore.
(02:33):
And even though it was super niche, right?
Like you're like, you're hunger to be like, Oh my God, this
could be my conduit to the wholeworld was just so exciting.
And AIAI has that same vibe. You know, whether it's giving
billions of people access to collective knowledge throughout
the world or in my space, at least, you know, you're trying
(02:55):
to create films, movies, games, thing people just need to
entertain each other. It feels like another desktop
publishing revolution is what myCo founder would call it, where
it expands the human pool of creativity because now everyone
can unleash that and and that ispretty cool.
Yeah, I think we see a lot of skeptics push back and say, oh,
(03:16):
so much of what's being generated is slop.
And I think that ignores how much of any person's creative
process is fine tuning and figuring out what the right
things to build are. And we've made it so much easier
to just build a quick MVP and get it out there.
Now, does that mean we have a lot of things coming out that
aren't fully finished products? Sure.
(03:38):
But as we've seen in these last 20 years of the Internet era, we
have this idea of building in public and we are very much
enabling everyone in the world potentially to create AI
generated content and code and to bring their ideas into
reality, or at least into digital reality.
So far, what do you see as the evolving role of human
(04:01):
creativity and human generated content as this inference
revolution is occurring? I see it as making it more
accessible, right? I always think anytime.
So as far as creative tools go, as long as there have been tools
every time, you know, I think the benefit of technology is it
makes things easier and it makesit more accessible.
(04:23):
The Internet made knowledge moreaccessible.
Google made, you know, the Internet more searchable.
So every wave of technology thatcomes builds on top of something
that came before and expands everyone's access to that pool
of knowledge. And when I think about human
created content, you know, I think about the fact that human
beings fundamentally do it because it's fun, right?
(04:45):
And it's a play is a really important part of our species.
And so this notion that human beings are going to get
completely displaced because production of the content gets
easier, in my mind is it's misreading the situation.
And I think one reason people misread that is because it takes
so much effort to make a game ora movie at this point in time.
(05:06):
But, you know, it's hundreds of people, many years, sometimes
hundreds of millions of dollars.GTA might cost as much as a
billion dollars. You know, these are very, very
large numbers. And they just feel so
inaccessible, like you have to be a Christopher Nolan or David
Cameron or, sorry, a James Cameron or, you know, an EA to
make these big things. And every so many years that
(05:30):
clock gets reset in technology. And I think what's interesting
right now is the film and game spaces are a little bit beaten
down. You know, the agency space a
little bit as well. Only because production sucks up
so much of the time. There's very little time to do
the fun part. What's fun about this piece of
content, you know, it can be workshop, it can be build
(05:50):
different iteration. It's kind of like, no, we need
to green light an idea. It's rush, rush, rush
production, movie didn't work. Oh my God, panic, go back, fight
again with something else. And my hope, my hope with AI is
it rebalances that equation so you get more time to let the
idea bake because creativity is not this linear process.
It's a lot of exploration, just kind of like, you know, improv
(06:12):
comedy and AI allows people to explore those paths more
rapidly. And so hopefully what we get out
of this is better content. More ideation, more
experimentation. More ideation, more
experimentation, more talent being discovered.
Where's the next Spielberg goingto come from?
You know, because these are the tools that become accessible to
(06:32):
them. And I would say that's happened
throughout. You know, when the, you know,
the Handycam came out and you could have a camera in the palm
of your hand. That was a big deal when phones
had a camera come in, you know, going to smartphones had a
camera come in. That changed the game.
And I think we're just seeing that next wave, you know, that
next evolution of like, if you can, if you've got good taste
(06:53):
and you've got concepts and you're willing to work at your
crap, you can become a Mr. Beasttoo, right?
And many years ago, that would have been hard to do.
You have to have a network deal.You have to have producers,
you'd have an agency involved. You wouldn't be a guy in North
Carolina who just works at this crap so hard.
And then he has a distribution platform like YouTube that gets
so big that that becomes the thing that he broadcasts on.
(07:16):
And I think the this wave of AI is going to invent new things
like that, that change the spacethat you can't even anticipate
right now. So if the marginal cost of
digital creation, whether that'swriting code or creating
content, is trending towards 0 as I know you and others believe
it's going to in this new era, what will the 2nd order impacts
(07:38):
be for our audience and for everyone who's seeking to build
companies or create today? I think it's going to be about
taste and distribution. Why do you have the taste to
create content for a particular type of audience and can you
find distribution? So I do believe marginal cost of
writing code is going to go to 0and the marginal cost of
(07:59):
creating content is going to go to 0 as well.
So in a world where you can create as much content, you
know, as people can consume, thequestion becomes, how do people
even differentiate between that?How do they even discover your
content? And you know, what you've seen
with, you know, vibe coding to some degree on Twitter, some
other places, as, you know, people just putting their idea
(08:21):
out there on a distribution platform, right?
And telling their story, building in public.
And eventually it grows a user base that goes, oh, that's
really, really cool. I want to support this person.
Mr. BS is a great example of that phenomena.
And I think this AI revolution is going to bring other creators
to the fore. And whether it's YouTube or some
new, new distribution thing thatcomes in, you know, out there, I
(08:44):
think taste and distribution arereally going to drive adoption.
And I think one thing that that people building companies and,
you know, this is my advice to founders out there, take it for
what it's worth, is think carefully about what you want to
represent in a world that is flat, You know, where
distribution, you know, everyonehas it.
(09:04):
But your goal is to be crisp enough, compelling enough to
communicate to an audience that goes, oh, that's, you know,
that's my tribe. That's my that's my people.
Whether you're building a podcast or a company.
Yeah. You know, Salesforce is still
Salesforce. What do they do?
They're all about sales, right? And they'll include AI.
They'll include whatever the newflavor of technology is coming.
(09:26):
But what do you use Salesforce for?
It's sales. And surely there'll be better
tools that come out. But Salesforce brand is about
one thing. And Apple's brand used to be
about one thing. And I think as you think about
building these software companies, the brand is the
thing that that translates the most to people.
And figuring out how to make it relatable to people, find it
(09:46):
compelling to people is actuallyreally hard.
And it's a language problem. It's a zeitgeist problem.
It's a what's the product problem?
And every founder needs to be balancing those three things.
Whereas I think most, you know, founders feel like, you know, if
you just make a product and put it out there, it'll somehow
work. But what you actually see is
sometimes that works, but often startups are about bending the
(10:10):
world to this thing that you want to come alive, and the
world doesn't owe you followership.
And so you've got to generate that followership by talking
about it and talking about it crisply and white matters.
And that generates the energy that people go, you know what?
Sure, I'll give it a try. Oh, wow, this really is cool.
Oh, you know, I didn't like it last week, but they shipped this
(10:33):
and now it's really fun and I gave them some feedback.
They did something about it. All of those things play into
kind of how the company's perceived, and that's when you
go from building a product to building a company as a founder.
Yeah, I've thought about this idea for a long time as an
individual in my career of trying to treat my career and
(10:54):
how I approach it as if I were acompany of 1.
And OK, like who do I need to sell to?
How do I market? What kind of product am I
building with my own personal differentiation?
And I think dovetails nicely with this idea of, you know,
what's your personal brand, right?
That's something we've heard from every LinkedIn creator for
a long time. And you've suggested and I think
(11:15):
very accurately that software companies because of the reduced
cost of creation of software andcontent are essentially becoming
brands and tastemakers where we need to have great distribution,
we need to have great differentiation and you need to
have taste to it, establish thisand and strategy.
So what does it mean to be a brand, whether as an individual
(11:40):
content creator or as a company,in this new era?
Well, it depends on what part ofthe stack you're in.
You know, I think, you know, Nvidia's brand is about to be of
the best AI chips and our promises we'll have the most
innovative stuff, things that, you know, Intel has left by the
wayside and let them claim. But you have a few new chip
(12:00):
companies like Rock and others that are coming up in this new
AI era. I think about it as they're chip
makers, right? They're putting their, the
foundries, they're putting them,you know, they're making the
things that basically are the, the, the metal that power this
revolution. Then there are the
infrastructure providers, providers, right, the the AWSS,
the Google clouds of the world that are basically the layer on
(12:22):
top of that, on top of which youcan actually build.
Then there's model companies, right?
The open the eyes of the world. And then there are application
companies. I think the interesting thing if
you say like this is a, you know, if you're building an
application company, I think brands matter.
I think brand matters all the way up and down the stack.
But I think it especially matters at the application
layer. And I think the more you get to
(12:44):
building silicon, right? Like you've got foundries,
there's much more of a Moat, there's a lot more forgiveness.
I'm not saying you should take it lightly, but I'm saying
there's a little bit more of a Moat.
Whereas in the application space, there's no loyalty,
right? You're building in public your
products, no good people can just easily turn off a few
product. And so, you know, asking your
(13:05):
audience, cultivating your community to give you a little
bit of the benefit of the doubt as you continue to build this
very ambitious thing that servesthem.
And them believing that you willactually do that and you
actually showing that they're going to do that ends up
becoming the relationship between you and an audience.
And that compounds over time. And that's kind of how I think
(13:26):
about it from my company, right?We're not building this product
for ourselves. We love using the product, but
we're not the audience. If it doesn't work for users,
you've got to spend every week, every hour sitting and looking
at it and going, why don't they use it?
What makes sense? It's not their job to tell me
what's wrong with my positioningor why the product doesn't work
for them. I've got to go through and
(13:47):
figure out all of that stuff. I think one nice thing about
this new era of rebuilding and company is AI can help with all
that stuff internally, and then you can start to refine what you
want to mean within this space. I also think Fundamentally FAST
can build more ambitious companies in this day and age.
Definitely agreed. Coming out of VC and moving to
(14:08):
becoming a founder, like, you know, I think one thing becoming
a a venture capitalist gives youa lens for is how big a company
needs to be to generate returns for a fund.
And you know, man, you know, when my first start up, you
know, I had an exit, you know, it was life changing kind of
event for me. You know, 100 million was, I was
(14:30):
like, it was a lot. You know, it was a big exit.
It was a lot of money. And now most venture investors
are looking at it saying, hey, listen, valuations have gone up,
but we hope in the AI space there's, you know, a $10 billion
exit. And yes, maybe I'm paying a
little bit more. But every company that's taking
VC money, I think their VCs aren't hoping you're like a fund
(14:52):
returner, right, Which is, you know, your company sells
whatever percentage they own, 15%.
Yeah, it returns all the fund. They're hoping for something
that is going to do, you know, 5X10X the fund size that they
have. And I just felt like if you're
going to build a company and you're going to take venture
capital, let's focus on something that is that big.
(15:14):
And I can't think of a bigger opportunity than catering to
human creativity or building newproductivity just given the sort
of functionality that kind of, you know, productivity gain that
AI is going to unleash on all ofus.
I want to talk more about this idea of unleashing creativity
and kind of dive into the details of what does this mean
(15:37):
for incumbents who have established distribution versus
startups who have taste and vision.
But you've brought up a really good point that we should dig
into first, which is, you know, having been on both sides of the
table as a founder and AVC, what's your current assessment
of, of the venture capital landscape for AI startups?
It sounds like what you're hearing is VCs are seeking those
(15:59):
outsized returns and are willingto pay that premium because they
believe this idea of, hey, you can build a bigger company
faster and and maybe more broadly based off of the tooling
that's being established with AI.
Well, I think the VC business isreally interesting right now.
I think, you know, the Zerp era,the free capital spawned a lot
of allocation into the space. I think the lack of exits has
(16:24):
caused a lot of people who did pull money into the space to
pull back a little bit. I also think it's a craft
business. It doesn't scale as well as
people thought. And so if you're going to be in
the venture business, you're either going to be a really big
fund, right? And you're going to be able to
index many of the opportunities in the market.
(16:45):
So you know, you're going to seemost of the market, you're going
to place a lot of bets, some of them will work out and you you
accept slightly lower returns inexchange for not missing out on
the 5 or 10 companies that are market making in any given year.
On the other side of it, you've got the craft business, you know
the way venture capital used to be.
(17:06):
And that business is a sort of alone wolf business, you know,
where you have to be a really good picker, you have to have
some advantage networks, some advantage source of deal flow,
and you have some thesis, whether it's about the founding
team or the future. And you tend to be quite a lot,
(17:26):
right? And you can actually win those
deals. And that business has changed a
lot as well, just because the number of funds out there, it's
brutally competitive. It's still pretty hard, I would
say, to raise unless you're an AI.
And I think an AI, one reason every, you know, there's so much
interest is because people don'tfeel like this is a trend for a
few years. You know, it's not like the VR
(17:48):
space or anything where everyonepiles into you, but like, you
know, everyone's not going to walk around wearing VR devices.
But AI is one of those few technologies, but because it's
not just hard software, it's human eyed robots helping you at
home using some of the same algorithms that, you know, full
self driving and Tesla's was able to do.
And so the implications for thatkind of technology and what it
(18:10):
could do for everything from human longevity to chores to
population aging, like really big structural things that help
the economy grow are just truly profound.
And so if you're AVSC, you're thinking, listen, I'm going to
invest in a company. I really like the founding team.
I really like this idea. I think there's going to be a
great business over here. But then I'm just getting less
(18:31):
ownership or like, you know, I'mlike, I don't have as much of it
as I'd like. And you've got to weigh that
against just not having any of it, right?
Or missing out one of those deals and that's sort of that
tortured space that, you know, investors live in right now,
which is am I paying too much for this deal and owning too
little a bit versus am I missingout completely?
Am I investing in the wrong thing?
(18:52):
So I know a lot of people think VC is a cushy job and you know,
maybe it was when every company was going public and it was easy
to make money in SAS. But all of those safe harbours
within VC have really started todisappear over the last three
years. And with the end of free money,
you know, from the Fed, I think it's really really, you know,
(19:14):
return that business to what it should have been, which is, you
know, very specific focus on a very specific strategy that that
investor is executing in the market.
It's still easier than being an,you know, an actual operator, I
will say as founder, but it's not an easy business.
It just takes a really long timeto find out if you're wrong.
That's the one thing about the VC business that it's just
different from founders. You know, it's very hard to to
(19:37):
hide the fact, but you haven't built a great product and you
know, your users are turning offor whatever it is.
And I think investing is different because you do get
these 10 year funds and you're investing them over three years
and it takes anywhere between 7 and 15 years to see any returns.
So imagine you and I have jobs where it's like, you know, it's
(19:57):
seven years before anyone figures out for any good.
And we're farther in the bare metal, so we're not getting
much. More.
Feedback. Exactly.
What about on the founder side? What actionable advice would you
give to other founders who are also navigating the fundraising
process with this new environment that's been
established over the last coupleyears, and specifically the AI
(20:20):
boom environment? Depends on what your business is
and why you got into it in the first place.
I would first and foremost say this is my third venture back
start up. You know, my first two were
acquired. So you know, I started this
company because I had a space I really liked, right, which is
the media and entertainment space.
(20:41):
I have a Co founder that I deeply respect and really like
being in business with going to work everyday.
We have a team that's really, really great.
Then I have investors in my cap table were great and are not
drama, right? And so for me, a lot of those
pieces came to fit and everything else about it.
You still got to do the work, you know, as, as YC says, like
you've got to make, you know, something that people love.
(21:04):
And that is all about digging trenches.
And if you don't like digging trenches, then I suggest you
don't become a founder in this market or any other market
because it's not this high concept that gives it to you.
I think some, some founders certainly end up becoming better
storytellers than other founders.
But it doesn't take away the pain of like, OK, you know,
(21:25):
we're trying this out. Nobody responded to my product.
What part of it doesn't work? It's a very, very creative
enterprise. Like what should be quite
differently and the speed at which you uncover and turn over
those cards is really, really important.
So I don't know that my advice to founders in the AI space,
it's certainly easier if you have an AI startup, by the way,
I will say that. But you know you, even if you
(21:48):
didn't, I would say the speed atwhich you can ship clarifies for
you whether you have a business or not.
And it clarifies for the world and other investors whether you
have a business or not. And so my religion at every
startup has always been shipped as quickly as you can.
It's OK if it doesn't work because if it doesn't work,
you'll learn something. And if it does work, you learn
(22:08):
something. But not shipping, you get to
live in your little bubble and vision of what it's going to be
5 years from now, 10 years from now.
And it's really easy as a founder to fool yourself because
your team doesn't want to hear the bad news.
You don't want to hear the bad news.
You have this huge bias around. It's going to work, right?
And I think that, you know, as Andy Groves said, like only the
(22:31):
paranoid survive. So maybe that's not the right
philosophy for every founder, but it's it's been helpful to
me. Like, you know, the moment
you're like, oh, that's it. It's really exciting.
Oh, that's it. That's who we need.
These people love our product. We found our little tribe.
How do I find more people in that community?
How do I build more stuff for them is just such an exciting
(22:51):
moment. And that clarifies, by the way,
everything about your culture, who you hire, how you go to
market, what features you build.You know, everything becomes so
much easier when you get that moment.
But most founders gets between, you know, the idea and that
product market fit phase. I think I read a stat something
like only 15% of companies are getting to Series A.
(23:13):
Maybe it's 30%, but it's pretty,it's a pretty low number.
There are lots of seed stage startups getting funded, but
fewer of them are making it to the Series A.
And I think that's reflection of, you know, the AI boom.
People are willing to write small checks into a large number
of companies, but then it's not really clear.
So I always think one round ahead to where does my company
(23:38):
need to be in order to receive that funding or be profitable.
Basically I got to be default alive.
Yeah, I, I think I've definitelyheard that phrase default alive
from, from other great founders.And I think it's also
interesting to look at the impacts that AI is having on the
relationship between incumbents and startups where it's so much
(23:58):
easier to get started with a startup now where it's like,
yeah, I can vibe code an app in an afternoon, have a demo and I
can maybe go out and start pitching.
But this also means that major incumbents who have established
distribution, who have established communities can much
more rapidly adapt in certain areas.
How do you see the current move of hey, it's easier to code,
(24:23):
it's easier to write, it's easier to create, or at least of
the basic levels, even if getting from, you know, 80% to
100% may still be very hard, impacting both the incumbents
who threatened startups and the startups who are attempting to
carve out new niches? That's a great question.
I I, it's probably easier than ever before to start a company
(24:44):
and any good idea is going to get copied.
And I think the difference between the companies that sort
of get through this uncanny valley of like, you know, we
have a good idea to, we have a company with customers that's a
real business that's, you know, generating profit, or at least
it's fundable by the world. I think the big difference is
(25:06):
they discover something that is uniquely bears like Mr. BS
discovered. Like, you know, there was this
whole other way to produce content, relate to an audience
and build it out. It's not like there weren't
Youtubers before that. But he had a vision that was
just bigger than everybody else.And he had the ability and the
skills and he put in the time and the effort to build it.
(25:28):
And so I do think AI is a vertical technology.
It's just like the Internet being, you know, incorporated
into all software. That's going to happen with all
of the incumbents and they will have distribution, but
incumbents are have a bunch of disadvantages.
And again, I worked at a big company, then went to start my
own company. So I have some lens of this one.
(25:49):
They're slow. Speed is the advantage of every
startup. You have nothing that you're so
attached to in the world. Whereas if you ever worked at a
big company, you know the product that you have the PNL,
you have the public reporting, the review cycles, you know, the
HR cycles you've got to go to, to replays talent OR recruit any
(26:09):
town. Like everything about a big
company is slow. So in other words, it's it's
very big and it can crush you, but it's a very, very slow
moving. So one advantage of startup has
is speed. I think the second advantage of
startup had is just creativity, right?
There are things that you can capture for a new generation of
users that the last generation of companies wasn't really
(26:30):
focused on, but for example, andcan be in super boring spaces
too, or spaces that, you know, because those users really care
about it. You know, as an example, there's
a tool many of us use in startupland for our bug tracking
feature request, like just how development work gets done.
It's called linear, right? And linear does pretty much the
(26:51):
same thing that, you know, Jira did.
And before Jira there were othertools that did it, shortcuts,
but it's a. Now, yeah.
Yeah. And so you get fresher takes in
the world, and they build something that's so insanely
great. You're just like, you know, if
I'm going to start something today, that's what I'm going to
be on. But I'm not going back to the
old way. So there's always a new
(27:11):
generation of people. You know, Canva and Figma were
the same way, right? Like Illustrator existed before,
Photoshop existed before. But when Melanie Perkins, you
know, the founder of Canva, cameto the Valley, she met with
every VC and they told her, like, this is probably not a big
market. You know, Canvas orders a
bigger, a magnitude bigger than Sigma, which is based right here
(27:33):
in San Cisco. And it's really because she had
an insight that the rest of the market simply overlooked.
And you would be surprised at the number of times that happens
both in startup land and with big company.
So the second advantage of some key insight you have that the
world for whatever reason is like, yeah, that's really not a
thing. Like Airbnb, Yeah, sleeping in
(27:55):
strangers beds at home, not a thing.
Getting into strangers cars, like, you know, that's not
really a thing. And so the market systematically
underestimates these things until it works and then everyone
piles into it, but it's a littletoo late.
So the second thing is I would say inside.
And the third thing I would say with really big companies is I
(28:15):
don't know the best way to say it is sometimes, you know, it's
like it's you. You've been a Lannister for so
long, you forget how to fight orsomething.
Yeah, right. The walls are really high.
Everyone's really rich. Like, you know, life is really
comfortable. You got people waiting on you.
You're not manning a post on thewall.
Yeah. You're not talking about the
White Walkers in the Wall. And it's really, really cold,
(28:35):
and you're trying to find food. And that's kind of what founders
have. They have that, you know, that
that hunger that, you know, thatlittle dog in them are just like
I got to figure out how to make this thing work every single
day. You know, as a founder, if me
and Charles don't get out of bedand we're moving things forward.
I'm not saying our team doesn't do that.
Our whole team is like that. We're, you know, like an
(28:57):
entirely, but the culture is very different from, you know,
when I worked at a big company, if I got up and I didn't do
anything, I took a week off, 2 weeks off, a month off.
It wouldn't be out of because you know, the business has
revenue. It's profitable.
Like, you're not, you as a person are not going to break a
business, right? And I think startups are like a
little bit like pirates. They're like they got into this
(29:18):
leaky boat with a bunch of firesburning on board and like,
you're off looking for treasure And like, you know, most likely
you won't find it. But eventually you hope to
upgrade to something a little bit bigger and then bigger and
then hope someday you end up like the US Navy, right, with
the sailor standing on the deck.And it's an aircraft carrier.
But in the beginning, it's just a boat with usually, like, you
(29:38):
know, one to three people as founders just rowing away and
then be like, well, you know, there's going to be treasure
over there. Let's go check it out.
Or we have this vision and literally nobody should follow a
bunch of pirates. But it's also where all the good
stuff comes from. Something new comes into the
world. Yeah.
And I think another aspect of this idea around insights too is
(30:00):
that even if you have the insight, if you don't execute on
it, if you don't create a differentiation, if you don't
establish taste around it, as you brought up earlier and you
aren't relentless about it, it'sso easy to fail.
As you mentioned, there are so many competitors that will clone
you today. And if you rest on your laurels,
(30:22):
it's very easy to fall back there.
So while it's both easier to start a startup, I also think
it's becoming hyper competitive as every startup has that hits
any sort of success, has multiple clones.
And so any, you know, taking your foot off the gas too much
as as some folks may have learned to do at larger
companies, will, you know, leaveyou open to these pirates to
(30:44):
come rate you. And you've been talking, I think
throughout this interview so fararound this idea of approaching
the new paradigm of AI building and building for this new AI
era. And I know that you've set some
rules as well for brand marketing and how to approach
it, particularly for software companies in this new area era,
(31:08):
when a startup trying to cut through the noise may
theoretically have someone copycatting its features very
next week at unprecedented speed.
How do you act differently in this extremely agile,
fast-paced, AI enabled era? Gosh, that's a good question,
man. I think the first thing is
(31:30):
there's multiple paths to victory, right?
Like the people who are the loudest on Twitter aren't the
ones crushing it. There's somewhere, you know, for
every one of those, there's probably 20 founders who found
some niche that they can tackle.They're building a large
business. You'll hear about them like many
years down the line because right now, like, they're not the
(31:52):
noisy ones on Twitter. So I think the first thing is
just doing the work, but at the brand level, at the relating to
your user level, figuring out ifit's actually working and just
really being customer obsessed. It's really, actually really
hard because as a founder, you have VCs, you have conferences,
(32:12):
you have all the stuff that sortof distracts you.
It's designed to distract you. And one big piece of advice I
have it's, you know, it's it's not brand.
Your brand is going to be built if your startup is successful.
And I think too many people get into it because they can get to
the NFL and they don't realize getting to the NFL is different
level of competition. Every round you raise isn't more
(32:33):
glory, it's more pressure to perform at an even higher level.
And and investor dollars are notsome sanguine type of thing.
They're expecting a return out of them.
And so this is a long winded answer, right?
But your question was how do people go by building a brand?
My advice to counters would be one do the work and be
(32:57):
relentless about it. Just customer obsessed.
Be creative about it. It's not just about the grind.
It's like, you know, how do I communicate differently even
it's the same customer? How do I do this differently?
What makes it relatable? But nothing solves for hours
spent with customers as opposed to conferences, BC parties,
whatever. I think the second thing is if
(33:17):
you can get good at language andAI is leveling that a little
bit, figure out what's the best way in which you can communicate
your vision. It is very, very hard for
startups to cut through the noise when the founder has a
great idea but they don't have aCo founder.
He, you know, has that gift of language to translate that for
the world. And you know, This is why I like
(33:38):
2 founder systems, you know, because there's at least 2, a
few and you have a way to bounceideas off of you.
So I think language, figuring out what format you communicate
the best, how do you best put the message out there?
Because the thing you can changeabout it is yourself.
Like you're the limiting factor.You are who you are, you do the
things you do well. And so figuring out how, what
(34:00):
modes you communicate well, I think is the second piece of
advice. And the third thing, as I would
say, take some risks. I think, you know, people, it's
like a frog boiling type of thing.
You come out of a big company oryou know, I believe had a failed
startup. Like you don't know what that
page is like where you like never again.
And so you just start taking risks that don't feel, you know,
(34:21):
like, oh, what's going to happento my brand?
Like nothing's going to happen to your brand.
Nobody like nobody knows you exist.
Like nobody knows that my company exists.
It's a really big world. And so take the advantage of
this time to take some creative risks and see if that cuts
through the noise. Those are probably the three
things. And I think founders tend to be
very conservative about those. They either don't put in the
word or they end up being too conservative on the message.
(34:44):
And then it doesn't cut through a noise where it's a pretty
noisy world. And this isn't new, by the way.
You know, Jobs said this at Apple.
It's a noisy world. And actually, the hardest thing
to do is simplify and make your company about one thing.
Focus, clarity, focus, clarity. And it takes a lot of effort to
Polish a company down to like one thing because when you
(35:06):
start, you have like a million ideas and then you see your
competitors and you're like, oh,maybe you should be doing that.
Oh, the VCs want this and I needto raise my next round.
Maybe our story should have someof this.
And what that does is it confuses the brand around, you
know, are you base or are you bad?
And there's not enough fidelity around it.
So that's probably my number onething.
Believe in what you're trying todo over the long run and focus
(35:28):
on that one thing and have the data from users kind of be your
North Star as opposed to all of the noise and start up land.
Always make your customers beer taste better.
And I know that this, you know, layers of distractions that can
occur. These can really take builders
(35:52):
off track. Whether that's, you know, as you
pointed out the narrative that'sbeing pushed to raise that next
round or conferences, something else, it can leave start-ups in
a position where maybe they get commoditized, where they're not
actually out innovating their competitors.
And everyone seems to be building similar wrappers,
(36:13):
similar agents in some of these areas.
How do you think founders today should be avoiding this trap and
building something that's truly defensible, as you put it
earlier? I think shipping clarifies.
The number one thing I've found helpful to me is if you have a
thesis, you ship it and then youget to see if it works, or I
(36:33):
should say differently, you can see what parts of it worked,
what parts of it didn't work right.
And I think people imagine this is 1 big event.
You do your open beta or you close beta and then this huge
thing happens. I think with start-ups, it's
more like you have hundreds of these things that you know
happen every, you know, over time.
And then you get very, very goodin your judgement about, oh,
(36:55):
this is the thing, you build a lot of conviction when the gap
between those ship periods is pretty long.
You just have two little data. You live in your own head.
You know, everyone's got a road map, Everyone's got this future
they want to build. But I think, you know, shipping,
I would say clarifies because ittells you exactly where you
stand. And then you're, and if you know
(37:17):
where you stand, you can do something about it.
I've always said startups are not a test of intelligence, by
the way, it starts where a test of intelligence.
This all the smartest people would be doing startups, right?
Like no startups would ever be founded by anyone except the
smartest people. But what you find to start a
business, to have it be successful, it's a test of
(37:38):
resilience and creativity and persistence and all of the stuff
that you know, and it turns out like 90% of people, whether you
play a sport or you do startup, they just don't have what it
takes to get up every single dayand you know, and grind away,
right, with no reward. You're working on your craft and
the work itself has to be rewardenough.
(38:00):
And I just don't think this isn't like a criticism of that
or it's just like like most human beings don't have that.
What person would want to, if you could have a great job that
pays you really well at a tech company or any other company and
you could have vacations, you get a family and kids, you know,
why would you want to work Memorial Day and like Sunday and
Saturday and schedule meetings and have this just be normal and
(38:21):
everyone's looking at you like, why are you guys doing this?
You don't get paid that much. Like you don't even know if it's
going to work. And so it's really not a test of
intelligence. If we were smart, we would just
not do it. But you've got to want something
so badly that like, you know, the best people to build it is
you and you want to, you know, recruit other people to your
(38:42):
cause. So I always think about it as
like it's a little bit of a cult, like a little bit of a a
mission, little bit of religion you're creating.
We're like, this is the thing we're going to do, guys, And
when we do, it's going to be awesome.
And by by the way, that pirate analogy is still holds, right,
because always like, you know, there's always some Jack
Sparrow. He's like God, It's going to be
amazing. We're going to get there.
(39:03):
It's going to be treasure, right?
And just imagine how awesome it's going to be.
But that works, you know, with getting people to, you know,
they're, I think Steve Jobs saidwhen you ask for help around
something compelling in the world, you will find the help.
People will come out of the woodwork to support your
particular thing. You just don't know where it is.
(39:24):
But you've got to keep at it every single day until that
message gets through. And so, you know, that's my
whole thing. I don't think there's like 1
answer for how a startup becomessuccessful or one type of
founder. I don't think there's any point
worrying about competition. I heard Paul Graham say, like,
you know, the thing that startups enjoy is the same thing
(39:44):
airplanes in the sky enjoy, which is, it turns out there's a
lot of air separating all these airplanes.
There's plenty of room to support many different types of
companies. And sitting in your Twitter feed
or your LinkedIn feed and be like, Oh my God, this thing
shipped yesterday. It's going to destroy us.
It's a moment of panic, but it means it's a blip in the grand
scheme of things. You don't know how they're
really doing. You don't know how hard they're
(40:07):
working, you know, know what's wrong with their company.
So. I think shipping always
clarifies because users tell you, yeah, I like it, but I
don't love it. And you're like, cool, what can
I do to fix that? How do I get people to love my
product? And, you know, there's that
moment where, like, you get those little bits of
encouragement, long plateaus if nothing happens.
And then one day you're like, oh, my God, this really worked.
(40:28):
That's crazy. And then sports is like that.
If you've ever played sports like you know, you know, I was a
tennis player, it's like it takes hitting a lot of hitting
against the ball to get your forehand and you work in your
backhand, you work on your smash, your volleys.
But if you like it and you really want to learn, you know,
your sport and it's a true for any other sport or music or
anything else. It just takes a while to to
(40:51):
master it. So you know, for folks that want
to master this and want to be inthe grind, it, it actually is
kind of fun. And when you're doing something
AI, you have the knowledge of knowing.
Look, it's all new. Yeah.
Like I have the same advantage some, you know, 20 year old kid,
15 year old, you know, kid does there's someone who's 50 years
old and has education. But it's just a matter of we're
(41:13):
all navigating the same market. It's all new.
And we're all being enabled to ship faster, whether that's, you
know, writing an extra LinkedIn post, building your next
feature, whatever else it might be.
There is an opportunity to leverage AI to help us ship
faster. Seems to clarify for me that OK,
great. We have to constantly be
shipping. You have to constantly trying
(41:35):
things. You have to be taking that data
back in, iterating, experimenting, as we've talked
about throughout the episode. But how do I build that
resiliency of taking on that grind?
And how do I build that, I guesscultural optimism into the DNA
of my AI company As I as I buildit, what do I need to do to
(41:55):
ensure that not only am I obsessed over it as a founder,
but also everyone I'm bringing on board is joining me in that
obsession and wants to solve customer problems and is excited
and fired up to do that. How do I get them to work on
that forehand? I think it's really hard.
I think the first thing is, you know, you lead by example.
So you you've got to be willing to do it.
And so first of all, I would saybeing a founder is not the right
(42:18):
answer for everyone. In fact, I would say it's not
the right answer for most people, just like being a pro
basketball player is not the right answer, you know, for me
and for most people. And so I don't mean to suggest
founders are in different category.
It's just that they're optimizedfor a different thing they're
optimized for like, you know, we're just in the grass while
the elephants are fighting and some people are better for
(42:39):
running things at Google scale, right?
Then a founder might be at that that stage.
I think one, you've got to be interested in the problem long
run. I think 2 you've got to be
wanting to be in business and I would say not just like, you
know, you can work with someone,but it helps if you admire
someone. Like I really admire my Co
founder and that keeps me wanting to do better, right?
(43:03):
And he has the same level of things as those mutual
admiration Society of like, Oh my God, it's so cool because
that's all you have this little 1 you started.
It's just like 2 of you. It's so cool that I get to work
with this person. Maybe you can build something
great. It's like you're starting a
little pride, right? So you got to be excited about
the little things and you're not.
Then it just becomes, oh, we're just going to add more
engineers, we're going to add more people.
(43:23):
That will all come. But you've got to want to work
with people around you. Same thing with investors.
I think third is you got to want, you've got to like your
customers. I think one thing I learned
across companies as an investor and even my first couple of
things is I think my second start up, which was like in the
smart home business, it's like it was a we're building smart
(43:47):
locks, right? And it's a company called
August. Super cool.
Loved it as a customer. I don't know if I ever woke up a
day as a kid and went like, you know, I love gadgets, which is
why I got into it. But I don't know that, as you
know, like 12 year old, 15 year old broth would go, oh man, I
want to be in the lock business someday Was just never like a
thought. Yeah, like, oh man, I'm going to
be the video game business, you know, someday.
(44:08):
And that that came through for me.
I worked at EA many years. And so you've really got to like
your customers. That's that's who you should be
spending the most time with. And I think when you don't have
that affinity, right? If you love payroll, it's fine.
You just got to love working on payroll for the, you know, for
your customers, not everyone. But when you don't, it sort of
becomes like an intellectual problem, right?
(44:29):
Like, oh, the product manager will work on it, the engineer
works on it, but you're not setting that tone.
Everyone ought to care about this.
Like Parker Conrad or Brooklyn is great at this, but that guy
cares about benefits and like payroll and all of these little
details so much that everyone that works for the company just
knows they have to care about itat least somewhere close to the
(44:50):
ballpark because the CEO is reading customer support ticket.
Jamie at Ring, you know, the doorbell company, you know the
camera company. Jamie had like his e-mail on all
of the Ring boxes for a very long time.
So, you know, when your CEO takes customer support seriously
at that level, it leaves no excuse for the rest of the
(45:10):
organization because they're notfocused on some project meeting
they went to. They're they're getting emailed
every single day about. And Bezos said the same thing on
Amazon. So, you know, I think that does
set the tone. And I think the last thing I
would say, decide what kind of business you want to be in.
There are plenty of businesses that don't require taking
venture capital. And, you know, venture capital
(45:30):
is really rocket fuel, right? It is meant for rockets.
It meant like if you take it, the assumption is you're a
rocket, you're going to go to space, like you're going to fly
high up in the air. But most businesses are not
venture capital businesses. So it's just helpful to figure
out, you know, this is a lifestyle business, which in the
AI age, you might actually be able to create entire lifestyle
(45:51):
businesses, you know, that pay your bill for the rest of life.
You can have a very good life managing a ton of people and you
can learn a few skills and keep evolving it.
You saw some of that in the SAS days, but I think you're going
to see a lot more of it in this AIH.
You're going to see it from all parts of the world with venture
capital is this pressure taker of like we're trying to build a
(46:12):
5 billion, $10 billion business.So if you're that type of
founder and that's your capital base, you've got to realize that
that's the game you've gotten yourself into and you've got to
figure out how to build that type of company, attract those
types of people and generate that type of outcome.
So I do think capital puts that pressure on you.
So be careful as you go through these rounds of what you're
(46:35):
seeing in your data. And also just be honest about do
I really want to build that scale of company or am I happy
with something much, much smaller?
And it sounds like a 16 year oldBarat may have been really
excited about the idea of you building a company that is
enabling creativity in 3D and art.
(46:58):
And as we talked about earlier, with this idea of, you know,
inference and coding and writingall becoming so much easier to
access for everyone in the worldand easier to get started with.
I can tell you're fired up aboutthis idea of, hey, let's help.
Collaboration for film, for games, whatever else we're
building becomes so much easier with Intangible and I I very
(47:22):
much see you taking those lessons too from Canva and
Figma, which they clearly did around this huge creative market
as well. I'm, I'm excited about
technology expanding that creative envelope for people.
And, and I think the one of the reasons I resonate so strongly
with it is, you know, I grew up in India, there wasn't a lot of
(47:44):
import export type of stuff. So, but I had two sets of Legos.
1 was like a space Lego and thenI think 1 was like a
construction Lego. And as a kid, that's, that's all
we could afford. And I forget who'd given it to
us. I would create all of these
things with the Legos, right? And as an introvert, like you
spend a lot of time like building things and constructing
things about how the future is going to be.
(48:04):
You see, the technology has donethat for successive generations
of kids and builders, right? Like kids are building on
roadblocks right now. And those kids are going to grow
up and become engineers or buildsomething cool and interesting
and different. And I do think these cultural
influences have a huge impact onthe future.
And I'm very excited about AI being able to orchestrate things
(48:29):
that were previously very complex, like those Lego blocks,
right? The fact that they fit exactly
right. And it was that easy.
And then you've had time and youfigured out how to create a
building. And you're like, well, I'm going
to create a tree or a space station.
But you were just figuring things out, and it was just fun.
And so my hope is, you know, someday you're sitting in, you
have the same resources that a James Cameron or Christopher
(48:49):
Nolan are the world's best game makers do.
And, you know, there's expert and you're sitting in a room,
you're like, you know, should bedoing the cinematography this
way. You know, what about a drone
shot over here? Wouldn't it be cool if the car
jumped over this bridge and you're just telling stories,
right? And you're able to create
something and you're able to putit out in the world and people
go, oh, that's really, really cool.
And even if it's not, you know, it's not for like commercial
(49:11):
appeal, it's just fun, even if it's just for your group of
friends, even if it's, you know,something fun for your parents
or your family you did or something you showed off at, you
know, Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas.
Those are like the little moments where I'm like, you
know, it's not about some big corporate thing where you're
producing big commercials and stuff.
It might actually bring the fun back to those micro moments.
(49:33):
And so I'm very excited about the fact that there are all of
these models out there right now, right at least in Myspace.
So what intangible does is we'rebuilding the world's simplest 3D
creative tool to communicate better with all of these AI
models that have incredible power that you've got to
communicate with them through typing.
So imagine you had like the world's most, you know, gifted
(49:55):
cinematographers, production crew, lighting people, whatever
it is. And you have Christopher Nolan,
like famous director on the other side.
And the only way he can communicate with them is by
text. He's got to do an entire movie
by text, move the camera to the left.
I want this. And then they, you know, it
takes a few minutes and then you, you know, it shows up and
(50:16):
he's like, no, no, no, that's not quite right.
And that's kind of the state of art right now, you know, with,
with ChatGPT and tools like that, at least in the media
space, right. If it's just text based
reasoning, research totally makes sense that text is the
right interface. And, you know, prompting is the
best thing. You want the thing that's in
your head as a human being to bethe thing that you see on the
(50:37):
screen. And text is just not the right
way of doing that. So the promise for intangible at
least is can we build something that allows human beings to get
the vision that's in their head to a machine, which, you know,
is orders of magnitude more powerful and can give it to you.
But it can't translate that if all you're doing is texting it
(50:58):
little bits of context. And if you can simply show it,
you know, in 3D in this interactive world, this is what
I need. And even if you do a rough
sketch of it, it take it and runand create a whole production
great environment, right? And that's that speed and
control that you want in these early stages.
And I think of Legos like that. It's speed and control.
I can control every little pieceof it, but it's also really,
(51:20):
really fast to put things together.
And the more you do it, the moreit builds your confidence.
And I feel like that's what Canva did.
That's what Figma did. So in this world of, you know,
models that are starting to do film and games and, you know,
campaign commercials and all thestuff is some way to create
virtual cinematographers and other people that you can have
(51:40):
conversations with and you can get good at this crap if that's
something you're excited about. I'm, I love it.
I'm super excited to see what you build with Intangible and
everyone can check it out at intangible dot AI and request
early access. Plus make sure you follow Barat
on LinkedIn where he shares a ton of incredible insights.
Bro, is there anywhere else thatour audience should be going to
(52:02):
check you out and follow the work that's being done at
Intangible? Twitter as well, and yeah,
people are curious about it, curious about the space.
Happy to tell you more, at leastmy point of view.
And thank you for having me on. Yeah.
Thanks for coming to share your point of view with our
listeners. It's been a fantastic
conversation. And everyone who is listening,
make sure you keep up with the latest AI news and expertise
(52:24):
from folks like Barat here on the podcast by subscribing in
your podcasting feed. And let's say maybe you're on
YouTube, maybe you're on Spotify, maybe you're on Apple
podcast. You're consuming this.
Hey, a light goes a long way. A comment goes a long way, a
rating or review goes a long wayto helping us get more
incredible guests like Brat and so many more that you've
hopefully listened to here with Chain of Thought.
(52:46):
Thank you all for tuning in and we'll see you next week, Brat.
Thanks again for coming the show.
It's been fantastic having you.
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My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.